Looking for trouble
Richard West The eye is no longer caught by the headline 'Springboks "run out of town" (Daily Mail, 17 September): for a quarter-century at least, we have been reading of protests against South African rugger and cricket teams, first in Britain, then France, Australia and most recently in New Zealand. Even in Ireland, as I reported from Belfast in January, the great, boring debate began again when an Irish rugby team agreed to go to South Africa; the Irish Times carried pages of readers' letters; and South African sportsmen were formally banned from taking part in a sea-angling contest off County Wexford.
However it seems that the headline 'Springboks "run out of town" ' refers to Chicago. Chicago? 'The Springbok match scheduled to kick off in the Windy City on Saturday has been moved to a less public spot, claimed a black activist leader, the Rev Jesse Jackson', according to the Daily Mail. Such is the boredom induced by apar theid and sport, that I had not realised until then that the Springboks were even in the United States, that two fixtures had already been called off, and a third, due to take place in Albany, had come under threat from the Governor of New York State. Nor did I know that South Africa, apartheid and 'racism' were now a major concern in liberal America. A little thought will show why.
The protests in the United States over the Northern Irish hunger-strikers were satisfy ing; they could be sung to good music; and they helped win Irish-American votes. But from the point of view of American East Coast liberals they lacked an essential element: Britain's policy could not be blamed on President Reagan.
Even since Reagan came into office, the liberals have been looking around for a cause to focus hostility to his foreign policy.
They are looking, in short, for a new Vietnam. The old Vietnam has faded away as a cause. It is no use harping upon the US in vasion of Cambodia, when communist Vietnam has also invaded Cambodia. Early this year there was much agitation on behalf of American victims of chemical warfare in Vietnam, especially the defoliant 'Agent Orange'. The campaign ran out of steam when it was learned that the communist Vietnamese have themselves been using chemical warfare against the Laos and Cambodians: and not just a defoliant but a Russian-produced germ gas named T2.
Early this year, some attempt was made to prove that America's aid to the govern ment of El Salvador was 'a new Vietnam'.
(This very phrase appeared on the cover of a recent New Statesman.) But this cam paign has aroused little sympathy in the United States. A left-wing takeover anywhere in Latin America will only mean another wave of troublesome refugees like those from Cuba. The belligerence of the US fleet towards Colonel Gaddafi might have aroused more protest from the American liberals if they were not for the most part suspicious of Libya and favourable to the Israelis, Gaddafi's main foe.
This leaves South Africa. The Afrikaners have no ethnic minority in the United States. Indeed they have few friends anywhere outside their own country. And Reagan's government has been almost alone in not condemning South Africa's attack on Angola to knock out the bases of the Namibian guerrillas.
'Now, for the first time', wrote Nicholas von Hoffman in the Spectator (12 September), 'the dogma of Reaganism has run into a political absolute held by other Americans, namely that there is something worse than Russian communism: South African racism'. He went on to tell us that 'for a number of shocked and bothered American blacks, Ronald Reagan is the chap who wages a ceaseless contest against the Russians for depriving white men of their liberty, but is indifferent to the fact that the South African black population, almost in its entirety, lives in the Afrikaans equivalent of the Gulag Archipelago'.
It is not quite clear from that sentence whether it is just the 'shocked and bothered American blacks' or Mr von Hoffman as well who think that South African blacks live in the equivalent of the Gulag Ar chipelago. Whoever thinks that cannot have read descriptions of the Gulag by Solzhenitsyn, or anyone else who has lived to tell the tale. Indeed anyone who had survived the Gulag, or a Nazi death camp for that matter, might not be pleased to have his sufferings put on a par with the life of an African in Soweto.
The difference is not one of quantity, though the 20 million people shot, beaten or starved to death in Russia (this a rather conservative figure) do weigh more heavily than the hundred people (this a high figure) done to death in prison by South Africa's security police. Nor does it matter that South Africa does discourage and sometimes bring to justice officials who murder prisoners, while in Russia, over the last 60 years, not one secret policeman has been accused of a crime in the Gulag.
The difference between South Africa and the Soviet Union is not in degrees of crime but in principle. The Soviet terror, the liquidation of class enemies, deviationists, religious believers and, later, minority national groups, was performed on the principles laid down by Lenin and Trotsky, maintained by Stalin and still adhered to by Russia's present rulers. The South African state is based on Christian principles and the rule of law — respectively the Reformed Dutch Church and Dutch-Roman law. Of course, the South African state does not always stick to its principles any more than an individual does. But racism, as Mr von Hoffman calls the denial of votes to nonwhites, does not conflict either with Christian teaching or law.
It would take too long to try to explain by what chain of historical accidents South Africa came by the present incongruous mixture of races, religions and languages which would make quite unworkable a democracy on the United States model. Even the whites in South Africa are more divided among themselves than were the Americans at the time of the civil war. Let us stick to that comparision of South Africa and the Gulag Archipelago.
South Africa and the Soviet Union are the world's largest producers of gold. Most of the Soviet gold is mined in or around Kolyma in northern Siberia. Most of South Africa's gold comes from the Transvaal. The labour for the Witwatersrand is provided largely by contract workers from neighbouring African states like Botswana, Lesotho and communist Mozambique, to which they are later sent back to prevent them squatting in South Africa. The labour force in Kolyma was and perhaps still is (we cannot know) brought from the Gulag. From the testimony of those very few, like Eugenia Ginzburg, who came out alive from Kolyma, it seems that as many as 5 million gold miners perished there from beating, hunger and cold in the Thirties.
Yes, South Africa is unhappy, like anY country where people of different culture and race and language live together. The same might be said of the United States. I would not say that race relations were much better in New York or Miami than in most South African towns. Nor do I think that most white Americans are better disposed towards blacks than are white South Africans. Partly because Mr von Hoffman failed to perceive this, he failed to predict Mr Reagan's election victory.
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